"Gen Z Wants Work-Life Balance am I wrong for disagreeing?" with Sarah Leatham

Yes, so as I said, my name is Sarah Leatham.

I'm a chartered accountant.

I qualified about 15 years ago.

I've or qualified as a tax consultant a number of years ago, kind of one of them COVID crazy ideas.

I work, I'm a finance director in my family's construction and property company.

And I'm also the founder and owner of the three stories bar in Sunderland, which has been quite a new, a new project for the family was involved in the construction of it.

And then operationally wise, and then obviously the background and the finance side of it, I run alongside my father.

So very varied.

In terms of what I do, but the accountancy, I suppose, lay the foundations of all the career kind of paths that I've taken and helps me in all that.

So in terms of finance, leadership, management and all that goes with it.

So you have a full scope of different industries, don't you, from the experience that you've got? And the one that you've most recently done, as you said, was the Three Stories, which is based in Sunderland.

So that's kind of a venue, isn't it? A hospitality venue based over Three Stories.

And is that the only kind of bar hospitality that you run? Is all the rest of it within the construction or have you got others that are around the country?

Yeah, so the Three Stories is the first hospitality venue that we have opened.

Never worked in hospitality before, but I suppose the vision with it was we owned the property for over 25 years in a property company and we wanted the property itself needed refurb.

So Roxburgh Plant and Construction, which is the family company, did the whole refurb and the time we kind of decided ourselves that we would take it on as a bar and it used to be a bar um and there's so much history in the building that we converted it back to a bar and it's the most beautiful building and i suppose with our business background in terms of my dad had run retail before um myself and you know the finance and management i'd my masters in operations business management no it's not the practical side of it uh but i suppose the foundations were there and i kind of like i like a good challenge so um i i've you know, we don't have any other hospitality venues.

So it's been an

eye-opener, but it's been great.

It's been something completely different.

And I think your dad still gets involved, doesn't he? I don't know whether he was over at Christmas time and he was collecting glasses and things.

I was in one time and he was in there collecting the glasses and getting people

organised.

Dad has taken on more of the role of kind of travelling and checking up on the property.

I was travelling every week last year up until nearly Christmas time and we just had to kind of make a decision internally here that I was gonna take a step back on that side of things.

And dad was gonna kind of go over and keep an eye on everyone.